Marijuana Business Magazine September 2018

to one of its stores in early 2017.The company ditched the technology after a few months, however, because only a “handful” of customers were using it, making it more trouble than it was worth. Additionally, some of those using the system ran into “technical difficul- ties,” according to River Rock owner Norton Arbelaez. “It didn’t work very well,” he said. Tracking and Recordkeeping Marijuana businesses, primarily growers, are finding use for blockchain in seed-to-sale and recordkeeping. While blockchain records everything that current tracking systems do, the technology’s advocates point out that it’s harder to manipulate a decentralized digital ledger of transactions. “I doubt that anything is truly unhackable,” said Julie Hamill, an attorney in the Los Angeles office of the Harris Bricken law firm. “But this is better than what we have now in terms of security.” Hamill added that the system not only offers better protections than typi- cal tracking systems, it’s more efficient. She pointed to an IBM study that tracked mangoes shipped to Walmart stores. With traditional seed-to-sale track- ing, which mainstream businesses use to trace produce in case of an outbreak of E. coli or other illness, for example, it took six days to trace a mango’s origin. With blockchain, it took just two seconds. Seed-to-sale executives acknowledge that blockchain’s constancy is valuable. But they still question the technology’s value to the cannabis industry. Blockchain doesn’t replace transac- tion systems, according to MJ Freeway’s Billingsley.That digital ledger is valu- able, she acknowledged, but it requires highly skilled programming personnel and lots of time to build. Furthermore, Billingsley argued, blockchain requires many business participants to truly work. “It does not work unless there are peers to share from and with. Block- chain does not work unless there are peers willing to host the chain and that both validate and accept changes on a peer level,” Billingsley said. And what happens when not all industry participants are involved in the blockchain? “It becomes meaningless,” Billingsley contended. ◆